Word: felix
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...FELIX MALDONADO woke up one morning to find he lost his face and name. Or rather, Felix Maldonado woke up one morning and discovered he had undergone plastic surgery and been given an alias. All because he had failed in an assassination plot on Mexico's president's life--an act he had performed against his will...
...begins a crucial section of leading Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes' latest novel, The Hydra Head. Billed as the first Third World spy thriller," The Hydra Head is about the loss of identity of Felix Maldonado, a minor bureaucrat in the Mexican government. In a Kafka-esque world in which he has no autonomy, Maldonado becomes an unwilling assassin in an international spy network competing over Mexico's newly discovered oil supply...
...Hydra Head's plot, like that of most of Fuentes' novels, is practically non-existent. It concerns Felix Maldonado's passive evolution from a petty civil servant in the ministry of Economics to a staked assassin. Events are connected enigmatically--Maldonado returns from his operation to his Jewish wife who is rocking mutely in a nun's habit; a man killed in a meat freezer scrawls the word "nun" in blood on the glass door. The reader, along with Maldonado, wonders whether and why things occur. All the disjointed events arrive at a climactic suspension--Maldonado's second attempt...
...Hydra Head came to New York bookstores just three years before Carter's visit to Mexico to negotiate oil deals. Fuentes would have smiled at the results of the talks. If the author had written a sequel to The Hydra Head at that point, maybe he would have had Felix Maldonado wake up to find he had regained his original name, or perhaps an ear or a nostril...
...evening's only knock-out came in the 139-1b. class, when New York's Bobby Francis landed a right and left combination on Felix (Perez) Almonte's gut, then connected on a crushing roundhouse left hook to floor the Bostonian. The referee stopped the bout with 15 seconds left in the first round...